Legislative drafting support tool based on XML standards C. Biagioli, E. Francesconi, P. Spinosa, M. Taddei ITTIG - Institute of Legal Information Theory and Technologies Via Panciatichi 56/16- 50127 Florence - Italy {biagioli, francesconi, spinosa, m.taddei}@ittig.cnr.it WWW home page: http://www.ittig.cnr.it Abstract. The NIR project aims at making the retrieval and naviga- tion among normative documents in a distributed environment easier. XML and URN standards have been established, as well as tools have been developed for the adoption of the established standards. In this paper a specific law drafting environment, NIREditor, is presented. It is able to produce normative documents according to the NIR standards. Particularly, it is able to handle the formal structure and the semantics of a law according to legislative drafting rules. Specific tools able to au- tomatically transform legacy contents according to NIR standards and to detect the semantics have been developed. Moreover, a module able to plan a new bill from a conceptual point of view is proposed. 1 Introduction In the last few years a standardization process of legislative documentation, pro- moted by the Internet migration of legislative data collections, has been started both in a national and in the European environment. This fact encourages the development of legal information systems with characteristics of interoperability and effective of use, as well as the definition of standards to build up legal doc- uments access facilities for both citizens and legal experts. In Italy the “Norme in Rete” (NIR) project initiative 1 aims at creating a unique access point on the Web with search and retrieval services of normative documents, as well as a mechanism of stable cross-references able to guide users towards relevant sites of public authorities participating in the project. To achieve these purposes, the NIR project adopted XML and URN standards to represent and identify nor- mative documents [1]. In order to make the adoption of such standards easier, a number of tools have been developed. The main one is a legislative drafting tool (NIREditor [2]) and modules which aim at managing new or legacy documents according to the established standards. This paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 the standards established by the NIR project are introduced; in Section 3 the semantics of normative 1 supported by CNIPA (Italian Nationa Center for Information Technology in the Public Administration) and Italian Ministry of Justice